I've been home for a week since 「中國皇后號」 finished, and I've been able to spend more time with my wife and the kids. The Chinese New Year holiday was pleasant. We don't 拜年 as much as many other people in Hong Kong, but we did manage to happily 拜年 with a few family members and friends.

Work on my web site redesign continues in the background. The specs have been finished and we're now working on the graphic design. It won't be flashy. I prefer simple and elegant. And there won't be any Flash content in the site because I've determined that the site must be iOS compatible.

Work on my new album is also continuing. My voice is not ready to record anything, but there's music to arrange, album covers and inserts to design, and content to write for the insert. This can all be done irrespective of my voice's condition. When my voice is eventually ready to record, we'll record, mix and master the album, and release it accordingly. I'm not a pop star and I don't have a pop star singing voice, so it'll require quite a bit of homework to produce something that I can feel comfortable with releasing.

In the meantime, I'm going to visit my parents in Gympie Australia for a couple of weeks to see how they're going. It'll also give my voice a chance to further relax and recuperate after performing at full voice without a microphone on stage for close to eight weeks (I used full voice from the very beginning of rehearsals to give my voice a chance to build strength for the live performance). I'll restart vocal training with my favourite vocal coach Peisha McPhee after I return, and we'll see how things go from there.

Fortunately, all of our kids are now in good health. Two of them had bladder infections, and after six weeks of antibiotics, that has been cured. Another tried to catch a hornet in his mouth and was awarded a swollen snout for his efforts. Five days of anti-histamine medication allowed him to survive that incident. Hopefully, he won't try to repeat the exercise. It's comforting to see them all in good health, especially after losing Beethoven. And it means that I can visit my parents in Australia without having to worry about the kids.

hello Stephen. I have hired the services of two firms to help me redesign the site; one to build the specs and put it all together, and the other to help with the graphic design elements, so I don't know what they're using. probably not Dreamweaver though. I could be wrong :-)

I've seen two instances where the CEO's of big companies prove their lack of I.T. intelligence; the CEO of Adobe when he was trying to dispute Steve Jobs' letter regarding the incompetence of Flash, and the CEO of a computer company recently when he tried to diss Apple's ecosystem. it's always about "closed systems", and yet everyone is free to chose to join the ecosystem or otherwise, an ecosystem developed and built by Apple. everyone who shouts about a "closed" ecosystem is ignorant and jealous that Apple was able to build such a successful ecosystem which by its essence excludes parasites such as the other generic PC manufacturers.

hello Janolla. the trip to Australia was great and very much needed. my father has really bad knees at the moment and is waiting for knee surgery. it's pretty tough on him because he's usually very active in the community and around the farm. it was good to be with him for a while.